Sunday, April 6, 2014

What an Editor Does



Every writer needs an editor. This may be the one at the publishing house, or it could be an honest and gifted friend. Both, unfortunately, are hard to come by.

There are a number of tasks that come under the general heading editor. In the sense that you need an editor at this point, I mean it as someone who can do the tasks in bold:
Acquisitions: acquire new works or authors for a publisher
Coordination or production: manuscript handling, planning, estimating, working with designers, printers, monitoring a project.
Copy: correct spelling, grammar, and if the publisher has a house style (Chicago, MLA, etc.) matters of house style (see mechanical style). These are often freelance copy editors even for large publishers. Sometimes called line editing because the editor goes through the manuscript line by line.
Fact: checking facts
Format: that the design of the book, typography, layout, conform to company policy
Integrity or continuity: internal consistency of the document regarding tables, references, part numbers, etc.
Language: how ideas are expressed—sentence complexity, conciseness, logical development, jargon
Mechanical style (house style): capitalization, spelling, symbols, reference style, etc.
Permissions editors: locate any place where an author quote another author, lyric, poem, etc., and obtain permission to use the material.
Policy: making sure that the manuscript conforms to company policy, e.g. presentation, legal, content, etc.
Project: follows the manuscript through the complete editing process
Screening: illustrations and table are correctly inserted, specialized typesetting such as mathematical formula or foreign words are correct
Substantive: looks at the work as a whole, is it coherent? Does the style work? Is all the necessary information included?
Technical: this has several meanings. Technical editing may involve someone with specialized expertise; the example often given is someone who edits a how-to book, making sure the instructions work. A another meaning is someone who determines the levels of editing a particular manuscript requires, and oversees the editing process.
Although you can see several of these areas overlap, what goes into preparing a manuscript for publication can involve many people.
The rule of unravelment applies here. If your prospective agent or publisher receives a manuscript that is poorly edited, you will have a huge hurdle. Yes, all publishers, agents, and editors claim they will read anything within their fields of interest and they will give everything a fair chance. They wont and they cant. Do not give them the excuse to reject your book because of poor preparation.
The more you can think about all these various tasks when you enter the revision or proofreading stages the better.
Once you start looking at each word and make a change, more changes must follow. If all of your writing from sentence to sentence is competent, and you make one sentence very good, it changes the relationships between words and sentences and you, or your editor, will have reasons to change more, then more still . . .
Editing is often done in waves. Big problems often obscure other problems; and not until the next wave of editing will you see it. It is not unusual to go over a book a dozen times.
I believe that the gods created single malt just for writers and editors at the end of the day. The battle is over, now you must be, if not friends, friendly.